Warnings: explicit violence/gore and torture

Chapter One – Punishment by Ordeal

The damp cavern still echoed the sound of Loki's own screaming back to him, even though his voice was ruined and hoarse, unusable to communicate his rage and pain. First had come the ritual humiliation, then the pain and then the isolation before he was left with all three for some indeterminate amount of time, forgotten and in pain.

The humiliation punishment had been painful and undignified, just as they had wanted it to be. Paraded before the Court of the great and good of Asgard then held down by Thor, Tyr, Odin and Sif while an odious little hairy man, Brokk, with bad teeth, pushed a blunted needle through Loki's lips, drawing magical thread through the bleeding punctures, ensuring his lips could move only an inch apart, enough to get a straw through and tiny chunks of food. He had struggled and protested, refusing to let them just have at him without a fight, and he had given Thor and Sif good matching bruises from the heel of his boot as he thrashed wildly on the cold floor of the throne room. He had spat curses on their names and pleaded for them not to go through with it, but they were stony and grim and held him down without any give or comfort. The pain of the first puncture was nothing compared to the second and the unkind pull of his 'seamstress' to bring his screaming mouth to a close. Brokk had taken his time as well, and while he finished his work, Loki could only scream and moan through shut lips and the tears of pain rolled into his hair, the needle had been enchanted so it would burn like a poker through his skin and the thread was not only unbreakable, but ensured the pain from the initial punctures would remain fresh and undiminished for as long as it weaved through his skin. Thor, to his credit, looked rather green by the end of the macabre ritual and had been the only one to hold a limb down without hurting the writhing god, all the others crushed Loki or squeezed too tightly. The eyes of all of Asgard bore down on the trickster, some horrified by the creature they had seen their prince become and some with mirth in their eyes as an unloved wretch got what he deserved. Frigga had not been present.

It was not long before he saw his adoptive mother though, she was waiting with a tear stained face in the dripping, damp cave Loki was all but dragged to by his escort. In her hands were the bloody sinews of the guts of a creature, her pale gown stained and gore spattered across her graceful face. These guts where to be his chains then, for blood magic was one of the oldest in the universe and time accrues power, so even words would bow before blood and Loki's magic would be useless in deference to what was to be used to bind him. He looked around to where they would tie him, perhaps simply lock his limbs together and leave him in a corner to starve, but he had been promised Punishment by Ordeal and he knew the sewing of his mouth was a side show. A rock jutted out of the centre of the cave, rough, but not jagged, as though it were halfway to being smoothed over by the flow of water. Bones, tibias and fibias had been worked into the rock, bleach white with water and age and his legs gave way as he saw it was some grim sacrificial table for him.

Tyr hoisted him up and placed him on his back on the rock, the uneven surface digging into him already before the Allfather took the bloody entrails and wrapped them around the wrists, ankles and throat of his adopted son, whispering the words of powerful magics that would keep his devious prisoner from breaking free. For a moment, Loki felt strangely warm and comforted, the binds had obviously been plucked freshly from the poor beast that had been used and were still warm. A familiar sensation tugged at him, something that was faintly comforting, but he could not place it because the feeling was only ever so faint and he could not concentrate through the punishing haze of his ordeal. His legs were secured before his arms were pulled back uncomfortably and locked into place without any give, if Loki ever wanted to struggle or writhe in pain, the movement would strain and tear the muscles and the trickster was acutely aware of that fact. Odin was making no attempt to hide where the sources of potential pain would be coming from, Loki fancied the Allfather wanted the prince to know so that the weight of his situation would crush his spirit more, if it could not have been so thoroughly crushed already. This was always to be his fate; punished for doing the wrong thing and punished twice as harshly for taking the right path.

The chaining was complete and Odin led the small group out like a funeral procession.

"Thor!" Loki cried, muffled, through the stitches. To part his lips so much sent searing pains through his head, but he had to speak. "My children…" was all he managed to say. Thor looked to Odin.

"Your children will not be punished for your crimes," he promised. Loki's head swung back to look ahead of him, the closest thing to a sigh of relief his mangled mouth could manage. He did not see the look of hatred Thor passed to his one-eyed father. The rock to Loki's prison ground into the stone floor with an ear crunching scrape before there was total silence. Even his thoughts about the silence in which he found himself seemed to ring loudly and bounce from the stone walls across his face and all around him. He gingerly tested his tethers, the angle of his legs was such that it would require strength he did not have to move them so awkwardly and his shoulders protested when he tried to bring up his hands. The sinews around his throat allowed him to move his head from side to side to a limited extent, but he could not move his head up or forwards without his binding throttling him, cutting deep into his neck.

A grating noise of rock on rock sounded above him and a small hole of light she through the hatch at the top. Odin's grim eye looked through it for a moment before moving away and Loki took a deep breath: his ordeal was coming. The light was soon blocked by something coming down the hole, something wet and slithering.

A beady, glinting eye came into view, a wide, gaping maw and long, curved teeth hanging from a slack jaw, a serpent. It was gold and emerald coloured, something so brilliantly coloured had to be venomous. It stopped some way above Loki's face, his eyes wide and fixed upon the creature that had been sent to torture him and the shaft of light from the outside was extinguished with deafening finality.

The snake did not move, that is to say, it did not move of its own accord, it swung slightly as though tied by a string on its tail and as the minutes passed, Loki became certain that the creature was no longer alive. He frowned, he wasn't sure what Odin had in mind by tying him down and hanging a dead snake over his head, but that didn't stop him from worrying about what was to come as he knew it would had to be horrific. Perhaps the serpent was the bait for some terrible monster that would come and eviscerate him, whereupon he would be left to heal until it was unleashed upon him again. This and thousand other possibilities, each more brutal and savage than the last until something hit him in the face, a searing pain in his cheek which felt as though it had stabbed right the way through his head and a sprig of echoing pain shuddered down his body in sympathy. He looked around, trying to figure out what had stabbed him, whether there was some invisible torturer in the cave with him when it happened again. His lungs expelled an involuntary grunt of pain as it hit him again, close to the last site of impact, his cheek feeling as though it were aflame and his mind was fuzzed by the shot of pain.

It was unlike anything he had ever felt before, pain that did not diminish, that seared through his body and seemingly right through his soul as well, knocking dents in his mental resolve that he had tried to build up far more quickly than he hoped would be the case. He was looking into what could quite possibly break him.

Looking into it. He opened his eyes and looked at the snake, its jaw hinged open and a pearlescent bed of moisture gathering on the tip of a razor fang. When the liquid dropped, it splashed on Loki's face and he grunted wildly with pain as it splashed to just under his eye into the sensitive flesh there. The swinging serpent ensured that the drops of venom spattered on different parts of his face, but the pain always shivered its way through his entire body like fiery eels. The drip was steady, a disgusting rhythm that was already driving him wild. It would have been going on for two minutes or twenty thousand years, suddenly time had no meaning when he was in horrific anticipation of every jolt of unceasing pain, pain he could not become accustomed or hardened to, a pain every bit as searing and cutting as the first time it ripped through him.

Time didn't mean anything. The venom drip, drip, dripped onto his face, sometimes burning through his eyes if they weren't closed, sometimes on the raw sides of his face, his lips, already burning from the stitching. One time he screamed enough that his lips parted and invited in a drop of the agony venom into his mouth, burning through his tongue and already raw throat. His entire existence had reduced to the pain that seared through him and waiting for it to come and tear through his soul again.

The venom had dripped into his mouth a few times now, each time provoking enough pain that his body would rack with spasms and convulse, pulling at his tortured shoulders and stretch the muscles out of the joint a little further. There was something about the taste that was jogging at his memory, though it was difficult to place as his conscious mind was saturated with raw pain, it had room for little else. He wasn't sure how long it took him to realise, perhaps a day, perhaps a year, but eventually the recognition clicked in his mind and he ran cold, the kind of cold that was so empty it took the edge off the pain caused by the venom. The venom pierced so readily and caused such intense pain because of what Loki shared with the serpent, the pain was born of a desecrated bond between parent and child. This was the last form of Vali, one of his most mischievous sons. This meant that the tethers of entrails that were chaining him to the rock were forged of the parental bond too and suddenly he came to know that Narfi's sinews were wrapped around his limbs, warm and comforting. The horror took a few moments to sink in and when the next drop of venom hit his face a roar of anguish and devastation ripped out of him, uncaring of the pain to his arms or the stretch of the puncture wounds as he strained the thread sealing his mouth.

"ODIN!" he screamed, pain and rage racking his body, convulsing as he tried to rip through his bonds, tear the thread or tear his lips, any way he could get out of here and get to Odin's throat, that wicked, depraved, beast of a man who had so cleverly hid the truth from Loki, whether it was about the prince's past or how much his children had been accepted by Asgard.

He thrashed and yelled for days. Years. Seconds. Every cell in his body screamed horror, vengeance and sorrow at his fate and the fate of his children. Frenzied, he wondered what had become of his other offspring; Fenrir and Jormangandr were already bound and suffering for their crimes (mostly the crime of existing) and he was sure Odin would not do anything against Hel, as she was a queen and had special protections. He had never liked the fact that he was forced to agree to Hel's exile, disguised as a deferential offer of respect, as it meant that he had only seen his daughter a handful of times since her coronation. But now it would be protecting her from a fate like that of the rest of his children and therefor was worth it.

Loki didn't love much in this world, but he had the love of a father for all of his children, no matter how monstrously they had manifested and he had to hand it to Odin, the Allfather really had hit on the one way to truly break Loki's spirit. When he had earned himself a position of power, regardless of which throne it had happened to be, he had planned to break his children free of their own chains and have then at his side to inherit the glorious empire he would make. How far he had fallen, and his dreams had fallen further. His rage and pain had never been so all-consuming, not even in the pit of that stinking miasma that had clouded his mind so thoroughly.

'Well played Odin, you can see me broken, lying in the entrails and spittle of my dead sons. I hope you can my hatred, eyes that once held love and adoration are now cold and burning for you, Allfather. You have destroyed what I hold dear, so I shall destroy your precious things, because I won't be here forever'. He swore the oath to himself as he shuddered and moaned with the pain of the ever-dripping venom, his face wet with poison and tears, but hell-bent on an exhaustive way to make this adoptive father pay for his crimes.

Hello all! So here I am again, something rather different from Tea Like Yours if you had read that, and it's sort of nice branching off into a new fandom too :) I would like to warn everyone reading this that this is very much a work in progress, so while I said that I would not post anything that I had not already finished/was close to finishing, I wanted to get at least some of this up. Hopefully this will keep my butt in order and make me write! So yes, work in progress warning for this story. This is also up on AO3, and I plan to post on both sites simultaneously, so no one should get the updates faster than the other. I'd love to know what you think of this and I'm looking forward to putting up the next chapter soonish. Thanks :) x